| western watershed romance |
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Man, have we fucking debased
Wild. Man, once a son of Nature, a node in a vast web comprised of
myriad colors and shapes, an integral part of the whole, through his
evolving mind power, now - now he dominates Nature, subdues Her, and,
in the process, dissolves his hunter past, now exists merely as a
ghost, a domesticated cog in this technocracy's automaton gearing. The
organic landscape, once a harmonious rolling and shifting and curving
of hills and floodplains and rivers and secret copses in forest
cleavages, now - now it's been shaved and cut and straightened into a
simple fucking math lover's ideal, simplified world, a world of
concrete, asphalt, monotonous tract houses, right-angled streets,
canals masquerading as rivers, the staid strip malls that homogenize
experience, a perverse interring of the very land that gave rise to
human life. And the actors actualizing evolution's story on the
landscape, the plants and animals, they now, too, they've been
straightened and tamed and dulled and squashed to where they're the
commodities the technocracy's gears process for domesticated
consumption. Salmon are planted in the sea like crops, monoculture
draped with pesticides decorates the produce tables at bland corporate
supermarkets, and dumbfounded, glassy-eyed cows gaze idiotically across
overgrazed fields where mighty elk stags once roamed.
And yet, somehow, despite the obtuse
goal of modern man to transform life into metal concrete consumerist
products, a vestige, a memory, of Wild - it remains, even in the
suffocating atmosphere of the typical American city. Grand old
sagacious valley oaks still proffer acorns amid the clatter of
smart-phone-drugged pawns stomping maladroitly on city sidewalks.
Leveed channels, banks stripped of erosion-controlling trees and
shrubs, water sterile from dams, in some areas, still, they snake
sinuously and, when Nature rears Her wrath and throws down floods, the
channels resurrect, at least ephemerally, their tempestuous past,
cutting new paths for the raging roily water, throwing rocks into new
formations, digging deep holes in river bends while raising the
ancestral point bar. In the suppressed waters of city park ponds,
non-native bass and sunfish and carp, they persevere on their own,
following the sun and the moon and the leaves, despite man's continual
smothering of pond life with poisons. And occasionally, within these
phantoms of a former, more intimate life, roam complete humans, those
versed in modern life's attributes - cars, schooling, home replete with
electricity and plumbing, electronic media - but awake to the
complementary atavism that, with the finer aspects of civilization, and
stealing Abbey's words, completes humanity.
On a still, gilded day in early autumn, in what was once the braided channel of Putah Creek but is now the Arboretum Waterway, a civilized man with only a lone rod, bare feet, one hook, and some old corn, with guile and grace, caught a koi, a mighty koi, a koi that persevered for years and likely longer than any of the copious, more drably colored carp that also inhabit the Arboretum Waterway, a mighty fish that survived despite her snowy, day-glow orange advertisements to predators, a mighty fish that still expressed a Wild heritage. It was completion.